Heat management can be critical in many applications. Excessive heat can cause damage to or degrade the performance of mechanical, chemical, electric, and other types of devices. Heat management becomes more critical as technology advances and newer devices continue to become smaller and more complex, and as a result run at higher power levels and/or power densities.
Modern electronic circuits, because of their high density and small size, often generate a substantial amount of heat. Complex integrated circuits (ICs), especially microprocessors, generate so much heat that they are often unable to operate without some sort of cooling system. Further, even if an IC is able to operate, excess heat can degrade an IC's performance and can adversely affect its reliability over time. Inadequate cooling can cause problems in central processing units (CPUs) used in personal computers (PCs), which can result in system crashes, lockups, surprise reboots, and other errors. The risk of such problems can become especially acute in the tight confines found inside mobile computers and other portable computing and electronic devices.
Prior methods for dealing with such cooling problems have included using heat sinks, fans, and combinations of heat sinks and fans attached to ICs and other circuitry in order to cool them. However, in many applications, including mobile and handheld computers, computers with powerful processors, and other devices that are small or have limited space, these methods may provide inadequate cooling.